Fran Aweeka, PharmD, will receive renewed funding for her grant from the National Institutes of Health for evaluating the pharmacology of antimalarial drugs in children in Africa. This is a renewal of her R01 on this important work, and will provide five years of funding for Dr. Aweeka and her colleagues at Yale and in Uganda.

My clinical work is focused on HIV adherence, ambulatory care services, and health-care delivery systems, particularly within community health centers. As the North Bay Program Director and AIDS Education and Training Center faculty member, I am also interested in developing effective education and teaching strategies for developing clinical practice skills. These include motivational interviewing, adult learning theory, and interactive skill building workshops.

New research support awarded to the UCSF School of Pharmacy by the National Institutes of Health during the 2011 fiscal year included these on-going projects by faculty in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy:

How do you convince patients who feel fine to take medicines that can have major side effects?

How can you help them stay on their lifesaving daily medications for years to come despite the obstacle course of everyday life?

How do you help patients and providers choose the best combination of three or more drugs from a selection of more than two dozen that work in multiple ways to fight a virus that can mutate to resist them?

A team of scientists from UCSF and colleagues have identified a new potential drug target for the herpes virus that causes Kaposi's sarcoma. Their research reopens the possibility of using a class of drugs called protease inhibitors, against diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's Disease. This research was published online in Nature Chemical Biology, July 26, 2009.

From the time the antiretroviral therapy AZT was introduced in the 1980s to treat AIDS, the drug demanded close patient monitoring to be effective. AZT had many side effects and strict requirements for how and when to take it. Misuse of the drug could lead to viral resistance.